What populates the referece.json path?

[juliatate]

Is there anyway to know what is running behind the scenes to generate the asset references for a page at the /libs/wcm/core/content/reference.json path? I'm looking for a way to show the Experience Fragment Variation title instead of the name since it only shows "master" for most of our Experience Fragments making it difficult to distinguish between all of the master variations. I have been able to modify the JS that created the Published References pane to display the path instead of the name, but ideally I'd like to modify what's being generated in the json for XF variations so that I could show "XF Name - master" instead.

[Lokesh_Vajrala]

Yes. ActivationReferenceSearchServlet is collecting the references of the page being published, which uses the ReferenceProvider implementations to collect all the references. There are a bunch of implementations for the ReferenceProvider class, such as AssetReferenceProvider, PageTemplateReferenceProvider and etc. 

I see there is a reference provider for pulling in the Experience Fragment references - ExperienceFragmentsReferenceProvider which is part of the Experience Fragments bundle. I don't think you've access to this file to override, but you can try implementing a custom reference provider to read the information you want from XF to display in the references page.

Thanks,

Lokesh

[juliatate]

Thanks, Lokesh! I looked at the one example I could find for creating a custom reference provider (https://aem4beginner.blogspot.com/reference-provider-for-aem-content) trying to add items to the existing xfreferences Reference or to a new one, and while I could see logs, I didn't see any changes in the output for the references pane. If you know of any other examples, that would be helpful, otherwise I think we'll have to stick with the path which is at least more helpful that the variation name alone.

Thanks,

Julia

[Lokesh_Vajrala · Accepted solution]

Did you see any references from custom implementation listed in response object for this call - /libs/wcm/core/content/reference.json in browser network tab? If you see it listed in response, you may have to write some custom js to show those in the References page. 

There are a couple of custom reference providers in ACS Commons repo which you can refer for your implementation. 

DesignReferenceProvider.java

PagesReferenceProvider.java